NEW Free Tool: Estimate Your MOSS Licensing Costs

Are you considering a migration from Windows SharePoint Services to Microsoft Office SharePoint Services?  Perhaps you are taking a first look at adopting SharePoint as platform for collaboration, document management and data integration.  Estimating your license costs for SharePoint can be a complex process.

Of course the best approach is to simply work with a Microsoft Licensing Specialist.  But if you're not ready for that formal of a conversation, or you just want to do some quick ballparking, we've got an exciting new free tool you can use that will help you get a handle on costs -- the SharePoint Price Calculator.

Just plug in the total number of employees who will be accessing the system, the number of front end web servers (WFEs) you will utilize, and the number of SQL servers in your deployment, and the tool does the rest.  Select or unselect optional services such as InfoPath Forms to customize this estimate based on your specific functional requirements.  You can even perform "scenario" analysis to compare potential configurations.

Why did Bamboo Solutions, a provider of technologies enhancing SharePoint, create this tool?  A few reasons actually:

• Bamboo Solutions works with over 4,000 customers who leverage SharePoint.  Outside of Microsoft, Bamboo Solutions has one of the largest footprints in the SharePoint ecosystem.  Over the years, many of our customers have asked us for help with understanding Microsoft's licensing model for SharePoint.  We are providing this service as a convenience to our friends and valued clients.
• Many Bamboo products & technologies, perhaps most notably MashPoint -- a data integration platform for Windows SharePoint Services, are designed to extend the feature set and capabilities of WSS.  By illustrating the difference in costs between MOSS & WSS, we are demonstrating one of the value propositions of Bamboo products.  Whether your adoption of WSS is an exploratory introduction to SharePoint, or a stepping stone to MOSS Enterprise, Bamboo can help you make the most of your investment.
• Architectural topography is never static.  This tool can help you understand the cost of extending SharePoint to more employees, or of adding servers to optimize the performance of your SharePoint deployment.  By providing this informational utility, we are delivering on the mission of Bamboo Nation -- to share knowledge that benefits the entire SharePoint community.  If you happen to do some shopping in the Bamboo Online Store after you've played with the tool, you've helped to subsidize our noble mission.
• We had fun doing it!  Frankly, this was a complex and interesting research project.  We hope that we've been able to save you some work by sharing out findings.  Please let us know your thoughts about this tool by posting a comment in the SharePoint Price Calculator forum.  If you found the tool useful, please let us know.  If there is more functionality that would be helpful, tell us what you would like to see.  If there are similar tools you wish Bamboo would develop, we are all ears ;)

As part of the new tool, we've cited all of our sources and pulled together a collection of articles that you may find helpful in investigating our licensing costs.  Be sure not to miss these resources, they are listed at the bottom of the page, below the new calculator.